Not dead yet

I suppose I'd better return to the minty net world. Hello. It has been over a month, after all. God. That's a long time. I would have thought the daily crying bollocks would have stopped by now. It appears that I am, in fact, very weak, and "just getting over it" is not as easy as making yourself believe it is. I have learned a lot in these awful 5 weeks though. Including that I haven't dropped dead from heart failure. (That's the real heart I'm talking about, not that bloody mess of muscle and fat(?) that continues to race extremely fast inside me.)

I still can't draw but I'm trying... I'm going on holiday to Tenerife on friday* so I'm hoping I'll be able to get some inspiration over there. Although it's not really lack of inspiration that's a problem. (If ever I wanted to create something wholly disturbing and angst-ridden, now would be a good time.)

It's like my good friend Needle Blossom aka Elly said to me "for the great master artist people, they get all inspired by depression and general shittyness. For us mere mortals, it's much harder." Then she probably said something along the lines of Don't Worry It'll Get Easier Soon.

*Wow, look at me. Being all pathetic about my life (or temporary lack of it) and yet I'm jetting off to some random country. And there are starving children, Rachel. The planet is dying, Rachel. Imagine.

Anyway.

It's a shame because I had so much arty stuff planned for summer. Totally uber exciting stuff, I even made a list. But this new Rachel doesn't like lists, and she certainly doesn't care much for what's on it, what she was going to do. Such a waste.

Oh I should probably announce my score for my t-shirt design on Allmightys.com, that ended weeks ago.
I got an average score of 1.23 (maximum was 5, remember), and 86 people voted for me. Thankyou, 86 people.

Needless to say, that average score is pitiful and didn't really help with my whole "I'm actually quite rubbish aren't I" thing that I've got going on now. Hurrah. Maybe t-shirt design isn't my forte. Fine. So what is then.

OH they've got a new competition up now, called Once upon a Time. Fairytales are bollocks. The princess always marries her lying, cheating, bastard of a prince.

I have, however, found a few interesting sites that have stirred some kind of passion in me (it's not dead yet), and so maybe I will share when I can be less apathetic. In the mean time, find me on del.icio.us and you can do it yourself. Rachelewis is my username I think. Maybe. Iono.

Hahaha. My phone just did my little text message wheedly beep thing. I've come to loathe that sound because it always gets me stupidly excited that it might be him, then of course it's an advert. Not that I think about him all the time, of course. That would be pathetic and heart-breaking.

Time to go.

Vote for my t-shirt design

This is a very quick post. Just to let people know that they can now vote on my t-shirt design (pictures below)

here.

You can rate between 0-5. I would appreciate your votes, thankyou.

Also just to let you know that I'm going through a very difficult time at the moment and being creative/drawing/smiling/living/breathing isn't at the top of my agenda right now. Maybe i'll post something in a fit of rage and genius. ness. but i doubt it.

i'll try and get back to "normal" as soon as I can.

edit - also if you pop by here, can you feed berryface please. she looks upset and i dont want her to die

Final Design for the allmightys contest, and a handmade card...

Next week is my friend's birthday so I decided to make her a card. I usually make most of my cards but this one is quite cool I think, and semi inspired by a post on Elly's (aka Needleblossom)'s blog. Mainly cos I stole her idea of using dulux paint chart thingys. They are so sexay. Right:
I haven't sent it to her yet so I hope she doesn't read this. Actually I don't think she even knows about my blog. She lives in Aberystwyth now which = no real world connections :P

It's all about decadence and my love of the victorian wallpaper resurgence thing. I suppose I should have made it about what she likes but screw it. She'll get what she's given :P (if she ever sends me her new address, grr)

Then a few days after that it's my auntie's 50th, and she actually is into that whole thing, well basically she's just ace at interior design, so i'll make it all about her house or something. Yeah.

I also posted this on DrawAnyway as today's task is all about decorating cards! How spooky.



Also I just wanted to update everyone about my Allmightys.com t-shirt design:

This is the final version. Voting starts next tuesday, (17th), so everyone needs to vote for me :D
That's what you'll see in the voting gallery. Wish me luck!

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works in this post is licensed under a
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Submission for this month's Allmighty's competition.

So I've nearly finished my design for this month's Allmighty's t-shirt competition:

Just a few more changes... I don't like the font, and the bottom needs a bit of work too. I was going to give it a spraypaint/stencil effect but I remembered you can't have designs with gradients on, I think. I'll have to check that. But it's nearly finished :) Should have it submitted early next week. Don't know if I'll have time to do another one, I'll see how busy I am. Sorry about the massive stupid copyright thing but as I haven't submitted it yet, I don't want anyone coming along and nicking my amazing idea :P It's transparent(ish), just look throooooo it. Eeek.

It's quite fun and cute, and I like it ^.^ And it'll make a kick ass t-shirt. Watch this space.

The other thing I was going to mention is that I'm now a member of Illustration Friday Night - definately not cute. But still hopefully fun. It's basically a blog-type-place for people who want bit more exciting/dark/scary themes, not ones like Twist. Or Camouflage. Don't get me wrong, I love Illustration Friday, and sometimes you find some really good stuff on there... but sometimes you don't, it can be a bit... 'stationery illustration'. Like nice little bunnies. And I do like bunnies. But sometimes scary dead bunnies are more interesting. Yes?

So this week's IFN theme is 'The Dead'. Which is waaaaay better than 'Geeky'. I've had lots of ideas for The Dead actually, what a great theme. Mooohahaha. And I've had 'Dead' by My Chem in my head ever since too. How I love that band. Off I go *skips away*

Keaton Henson

Update May 2009:
I've been noticing a lot of traffic to this particular page on my blog. Guess Keaton's a popular guy! However this is quite an old post and so doesn't have a lot of relevant, recent information about him. Go to his new website www.keatonhenson.com and have a gander there.
What do you think of Keaton's work? Feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of the page. Alternatively, have a look around the rest of my blog and get involved! Maybe even subscribe, I'm quite interesting! :)

The other day I was wearing an Enter Shikari t-shirt that i bought at Download, and it reminded me that I was going to find out who did the album artwork for Take To The Skies. So I found out. His name is Keaton Henson, and this is his website.

It's not fair. He is a year younger than me. And he's so talented already, no university degree, just went out and did it all himself. You can read about him on his biography page, anyway. It kinda depresses me 'cos here is a guy who knows exactly what he's all about, he's already got awesome commisions, knows his style and just produces this amazing, quirky work. I'm nowhere near that stage yet, I don't even have a style.

It makes me think I should just give up if people are going to be so much better than me, and younger! :(

Ok, self pitying rant over. Sorta. I'm not jealous, I just want to be exactly like that ;)

Here is some examples:
Take to the Skies front cover
Monsterrr Clothing
T-shirt Design
Hearts Under Fire EP cover.


The thing that I aspire to is this:


Having your artwork, like if you were commissioned by a band, up on stage in front of loads of people... god that would feel so amazing. One day.

(All images copyright to Keaton, damn him.)

Must be some kind of rift in the space-time continuum.

I haven't posted in a while... been quite busy recently, nothing that exciting though. I said to myself I was going to post here once a day but that never happened. I will try though.

Anyway, you may have noticed I prettified my blog ^.^ I'm not overly keen on the header, so that might change soon, but it's ok for time being. Much better than the standard blogger text bit anyway. And I had lots of fun fiddling with colours last night so everything matches now. Hurrah!

There is a new t-shirt design competition open over at Allmightys.com. The theme for this one is 'Big City Life' and I'm going to try my hardest to win :) I've had a few ideas already, especially as one of my First Year projects was called 'The City', so I think I'll use the concept from that illustration. (Click to have a look, I posted it back in May.)

So here are a couple of my initial sketches for the competition:

This comes from that illustration that I did, but I'll do it in Illustrator (or try to), and use nice flat colours and stuff. Or...

There's this one, not as keen on this, it's supposed to be showing the road and the speeding lights of the cars at night. Meh.

I want to think up of some better ideas though, focussed on the actual 'life' of the city. And make them good. I have about 20 or so days though so I should be ok. I'm going to try to submit more than one design though because then I'll have a better chance won't I :)

So that's that. I also wanted to post about this great little site I came across via Illustration Friday, called Drawanyway.com. Check it out; the basic premise is that all of us, even the busiest, have a few minutes a day that can be used to draw. So there are daily, quick tasks set on there for anyone of any artistic ability to take part in. So far it's been fun :) I'm trying to use it because I know I need to draw more than I do, and the community feel means you can get some really great feedback on what you've done. It's only small so far but I've got a feeling it's really going to take off. For example, the other day the task was a self portrait, and the aim is to do most of these tasks in about 10-15 mins. Here's my attempt:
It's not that great; just shows how bad I've got at drawing now I don't do it every week. That's the good thing about uni, free life drawing classes :)

Tomorrow I start a temporary short job at a local design company, editorial and publication design, that kind of thing. Should be really good but I'm so nervous! I'm such a wuss. Everything frightens me. Life frightens me. It gets scarier as I get older too =/ But I shall post here tomorrow after my first day. Eep.

Last thing I wanted to say today was that a few weeks ago, while being bored and browsing on the internet, I typed in Rachel Lewis Illustration (for that is me, don'tcha know) into google, and guess what came up. Well, go look for yourself! I'm the 3rd entry down, but, and here is a massive shock, there is another illustrator called Rachel Lewis. An entry above me. Oh my god. Blasphemy. Bit unfortunate, eh. Out of all the careers :P Anyway, so I had a look on her website, www.rachellewisillustrator.com, and actually her stuff is quite good. I say actually as if i wasn't expecting it to be, no I just feel a bit put out, I hate when other people have my name! And my career. Boohoo. I like her editorial illustrations the most, like this one:
That's a bit small. Er, click on it.

And look, that's even the style I like!! Oh dear.

....Maybe it's me in the future. Or a rift in the space-time continuum. Waaa!!

Anyway, go look at her stuff. She is a better Rachel Lewis Illustrator than I am at the moment.

I hope people don't get confused. I'll have to change my name to Princess Conswale Bananahammock.

Update May 2009: I think she is now defunct... that website doesn't work anymore. So maybe I am the only Rachel Lewis of Illustration now? Who knows. You can see MY website over at the wonderful place of www.rachelsayshello.com... home of the real Rachel Lewis ;) hehe.

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works in this post is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Download Festival, Illustration Friday and other fun stuff

'Ello all! Just a (not so) quick update on stuff.

I got back from Download Festival yesterday, it was such a great weekend! Saw some really amazing bands and met up with loads of people I haven't seen for ages :) I'm not going into great detail about it 'cos I could go on for hours, but Id say the top 3 bands were Enter Shikari, My Chemical Romance and Linkin Park. I suppose they are also my 3 favourite bands but yeah, they were amazing. Especially Enter Shikari, what a rave! My bag broke and everything but had such a good time.
I met Aiden as well, at a Q&A session thing, that was awesome. I was going to meet Linkin Park but the meet and greet was at the same time as Marilyn Manson, and I'd never seen him before. (I've met LP 3 times now.) So I gave my pass to a friend :) Yay.

So, I never did get the chance to finish last week's Illustration Friday topic, but I've decided to do it anyway because... well I wanted to. But this week's topic is also good. It's 'Suit', and I think I'll go down the 'suit of cards' route :) So after I've finished Your Paradise, I'll do that one too :)

So for the 'Your Paradise' one I really wanted to use Illustrator, as I barely know much about it. So I've downloaded the free trial of cs3 and had a go on it today. This is what I've done so far:
I'm quite pleased with it so far! Obviously it will have some sort of colour/texture but this is just the lines at the mo. Paths are quite fun. Except I can't figure out how to join some of them, it keeps saying something like "paths need to be in the same group or not grouped at all" or something. I dunno. If anyone knows the answer then do tell :)

So yes the basic premise for 'Your Paradise' is a self portrait of me, listening to my ipod. But it's actually me plugged into flowers and nature and stuff. Soon I'll add lyrics and scribbles and inky bits. Basically my paradise is listening to music outside, completely tuned off, doodling a bit and not caring about anything :)

I look a bit moody but i'm supposed to be concentrating =P

The results for the Allmightys t-shirt competition came out today; unfortunately I didn't win :( My average score was 2.02, but I did have 131 people vote for me, so thank you very much everyone!! You can see the winners here.

So that's about all I have to say really. I shall post my finished illustration friday illo when it's done :)

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works in this post is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Random Ramblings and Reminders from Rachel

Haven't posted in a few days so I think I shall :)

The new Illustration Friday topic, Your Paradise, is pretty cool, I like it a lot. Shame I don't think I'll have enough time to do it though =/ I've been up at Wolverhampton visiting Russell this weekend, going home tonight, so no art has taken place, I have one day at home tomorrow, then I'm off to Download! Which I'm very excited about. I hope the weather holds up =/

So I could attempt it tomorrow but I don't want to do another half-arsed one like last time. It would be good to spend a few days on it. I have a few basic initial ideas though, either a personal response, some kind of self portrait (perhaps with my ipod on, cos when I'm enveloped in my own little world of music, that's my paradise) with/collage/decoration, maybe even do it vector style... then of course another paradise is creating art itself... which means that the piece could be anything, even just a 'happening' (ooo so arty) as the actual creation of the work would be the outcome.
Or focus on the definition of the word itself... paradise, utopias etc... and then go a bit different, and base it on a dystopia... because of cours ethe title is 'Your Paraadise', not My Paradise... and your paradise could be my idea of hell.

You see. So many ideas, but no time :( I'll see what mood I'm in tomorrow though, I might just throw together the self portrait idea. It's a bit 'a-level girl art' isn't it, though. Like "Oh I'm sooo misunderstood, the only time I'm at total peace is when I'm listening to my tuuuunes on my ipod that my daddy bought me".

Which isn't true. My dad didn't buy me my ipod. I won it. So HA take that, apple.
Except I <3 href="http://www.handiedan.com/">
http://www.handiedan.com/

I can't put an image up 'cos it's all flash based, but go see. Everything varies quite a lot but my favourite stuff is the kind that the site is decorated with.

Its just the vector swirls and the inkyness and the website is amazing and I'm very jealous :(

Also, this guy:
Leo Hillier.

Looky how cute it is ^.^

I can't remember how I came across him.. just one of my random internet trawls I guess - but his work is so cute, I really love it.

Two totally different styles but I love them both.

See this is my problem, how am I ever going to figure out a style if I have influences from so many different things? Sigh. Watch and find out I suppose.

OH and before I go, just a reminder to any passers-by to vote for my t-shirt design!

Details are in a previous post but just go here, register, and rate my design!

Have a look at the others too, some are amazing.

Right, enough of this madness. No-one will have got to the end anyway.

If I don't do the IF topic tomorrow I'll definately do my blog header design. It's waaay boring right now. I'm thinking inky/collage doodle type thing, with just 'Rachel Lewis Illustration', or maybe something a bit weirder than that. I keep trying to think up of fun blog titles but they're all a bit lame.

I will ponder it on the train journey :)

Vote for my design at allmightys.com!

Yep, if you're interested at all, I have a t-shirt design up for public voting at the wonderful world of www.allmightys.com. If I win my design gets made, so this is where you come in :)

1) Go to http://allmightys.com/features/vote_designs/not_cached/index.htm

2) Look through all/some of the designs (there are 86 so i'll let you off looking at them all) And vote them 0-5 of how good you think they are.

3) The most important step - If you only look at one design, make sure it's mine!! It's about 2/3rds of the way down the voting page and looks like this:

(Yes I know it's posted down in another post, but this is the final one, waa waa)

4) If you like it, give it a nice fat 5 for me :) I'll love you lots.

5) Look around the rest of the site. There are pretty t-shirts there!

That's it. Let me know if you do vote though, even if you give it a 0 ;)




* don't you dare give it a 0.



...Right, off to finish Illustration Friday...

Scary Biscuits!

My housemate Claire had "scary biscuits" as her MSN name once, and I thought it was too cool of a statement to pass up. So I dreamt up this. It was just a silly sketch that I stuck on her door but then I got to colouring it in on photoshop... quite crudely really but it does it's job.

Anyway then I stumbled upon the 'Monsters and Mayhem' competition at Allmightys.com
and thought it would be fun to enter it. I haven't actually done so yet cos you have to make templates and thumbnails etc but I will do, cos I've only got until next thursday. If you win you get a percentage of the price of every t-shirt sold, so that's way cool. If I knew how to work illustrator properly I would've coloured it using that, you know with paths and vectors and stuff, so it was all smooth. This look s a bit like it was coloured in paint. But it wasn't, honest!

Yay. Next week I'm going to do my first Illustration Friday attempt. Go me!

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works in this post is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.